1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a management system, a monitoring apparatus, and a management method for monitoring, for example, a status of an image forming apparatus and the like, and particularly to information acquisition from an image forming apparatus.
2. Description of the Related Art
In the copy machine business, it has been general practice to acquire charging information, such as the total number of printed sheets from an image forming apparatus, such as a copy machine, and charge according to the acquired charging information. For example, in a client company it has been common practice to count, by department, the number of sheets printed on several image forming apparatuses installed in the company, and charge the maintenance fee to each department based on the information on the counted number of sheets.
Also, when the number of printed sheets by department and the number of printed sheets by an image forming apparatus are sequentially acquired from counters provided for the respective apparatuses that indicate current values, in some cases the sum of the number of printed sheets by department does not agree with the sum of the number of printed sheets by apparatus due to printing in progress, and therefore a method for preventing such disagreement has been proposed in, for example, Japanese Patent Laid-Open No. 2007-018500 (to be referred to as Patent document 1). With this method, the number of printed sheets by an image forming apparatus is acquired before and after the acquisition of the number of printed sheets by department, and it is determined that the printed sheet number acquisition has been successful if the number of printed sheets by apparatus does not change.
However, in the case where printing is uninterruptedly executed on an image forming apparatus that is a target of the printed sheet number acquisition, for example in the case of an image forming apparatus installed in a POD center, the printed sheet number acquisition often fails with the method disclosed in Patent document 1. The impact of this problem is reduced by counting the number of printed sheets for users of the image forming apparatuses outside of business hours, but the image forming apparatuses might be turned off at the close of business hours, or there is the possibility that the company operates on a 24 hour a day basis due to automation or the like. In such cases, the charging information may not be able to be transmitted to a distant management server. If the charging information is not transmitted to the management server on the due date for billing (bill creation date), a representative from a sales company needs to visit the client company and check the number of printed sheets.